Archive for May, 2010

Brazilian site RecorteCole has some fun little paper models, including the one pictured to the right, which is a Portuguese style ship called a caravela, similar to the one Pedro Álvares Cabral sailed on in 1500 from Portugal to India, in the process discovering Brazil. More importantly, though, the site includes a modified model with regular sails and a Jolly Roger skull and crossbones flag to make your own pirate ship! Try your hand at making either, or make both and stage a mini pirate attack at sea.

Like this:

Things have been kinda quiet here on the APPraisal front, but not because there’s a lack of great iPhone / iPod Touch apps out there. Whether about apps or music or life, I generally only post when I have something to say. I don’t post just to post. For APPraisal, that means using an app enough to be able to talk about it meaningfully and give an honest opinion, and while I’ve downloaded and dabbled with several apps over the last few weeks, I haven’t used most of them enough to talk fairly about. However, if the lack of APPraisal posts just makes you want to fling a bird at a brick wall (or even if it doesn’t), you may want to know more about Angry Birds.

Long time readers will no doubt be familiar with my love of video game music soundtracks, especially of the free variety. Joystiq posted a story today about the cancellation of Wii horror game Sadness. It was in development hell for years, rumored even to be vaporware, and finally canceled. This was confirmed last month by the game’s musical composer, Arkadiusz Reikowskiego, who released the music tracks on his blog for download. So to alleviate your sadness at the cancellation of the game, enjoy the work-in-progress Sadness soundtrack for free!

Like this:

“Hey Zark, how do you get those social bookmark buttons at the bottom of your blog posts?”

I get asked this quite frequently. I use WordPress.com, which has worked great for me, but the social bookmark button concept is not something they have built-in. That’s why I’ve bookmarked GetSocialLive.com, which does the heavy lifting for me. Once I have a post set up, I can go to the site and paste in the post’s title and URL, and choose a button style, and the site will automatically generate the social button bookmark html code for me. Pasting that at the bottom of my post’s html page gives me a nice social bookmarking buttons for people to use. There are a variety of designs to choose from, such as:

Originally, creator Hillel Stoler wrote GetSocial as Windows software. He expanded that cross-platform with a web-based version called GetSocial Live!, which is what I use all the time. Both were created by Stoler for free for the WordPress.com community. If you find either useful, give him a donation as thanks, and let me know what you think!